ColdQuanta, a startup based in Colorado, USA, has announced a service that puts quantum materials into the cloud. It cooled tens of thousands of rubidium atoms to near absolute zero. Then, it was uploaded to the cloud and made accessible from the web. Of course, you need to apply to ColdQanta and get permission to access it.
The cooled rubidium atom behaves quantumly, unlike room temperature. These movements can be observed interactively while the user directly manipulates them on the web. Of course, right now, it is limited to 100 people to access and find bugs, but the company said it plans to expand the target.
Coldquanta calls the rubidium atom, hardware, software, and other systems as Albert. The rubidium atom for Albert is contained in a glass container at the company’s research facility in Boulder, Colorado. Engineers connected devices such as lasers and magnets to this to create an environment to handle rubidium atoms from the outside. When you press a button in the browser, the device in the laboratory actually handles moving atoms.
What Albert can do is magnify the rubidium atom in a glass container, create an electromagnetic field to photograph the atom over a barrier, or change a state called Bos-Einstein condensation in an atomic gas. It’s like an observation camera that can observe animals, but what you can observe through Albert is not an animal, but a cold quantum thinner than a human hair.
ColdQanta’s goal is to make quantum matter more ordinary than it is now. It is intended to make the public feel familiar with quantum materials and actions. Among them, it can be useful for education. Until now, the use of tricky equipment in laboratories has been required to capture or cool atoms studying quantum materials. But if you have access to the cloud, you can observe this behavior in a distant classroom.
Physics predicts that the quantum properties of cooling atoms can be applied to devices. An example is an accurate gravity sensor. Gravity sensors use the property that when atoms rush to each other to create an interference pattern, the pattern changes by the Earth’s magnetic field. NASA has already built a sensor prototype that uses cooling atoms and is also mapping the Earth’s magnetic field. This may make it easier to accurately observe glaciers or tsunami movements.
Quantum materials could potentially be used in other satellite composition studies. There is also an example of cooling quantum matter, cooling it until it condenses Bos-Einstein, and creating miniature models of complex natural phenomena such as black holes. Studying this model can help you build hypotheses about real objects.
ColdQanta aims to create a more accessible environment for quantum materials in several fields. This will allow us to design our own quantum systems and solve problems. Of course, this is not the first time that a quantum material system capable of remote control has been released. In 2018, a Danish research team invited 600 people to a game that manipulates the Boss-Einstein condensation. In 2018, ColdQanta also collaborated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Research Institute to set up a quantum material laboratory at the International Space Station to allow researchers on Earth to manipulate the material in the ISS. More information on Cold Qanta can be found here .